August 20, 2001

U.S. is most religiously diverse nation, author says
___By Cecile Holmes
___Religion News Service
___BOSTON--So diverse is the religious landscape of the United States today that the nation is radically different than that envisioned by America's founders, according to a new book on pluralism.
___The United States has become the most religiously diverse nation in the world, Harvard researcher Diana Eck says in "A New Religious America."
___While many Americans were taught as schoolchildren that this nation was settled by pilgrims who sought freedom to practice their particular form of Christianity, Eck illustrates how the United States has become a different type of "promised land" today.
___"These changes to the American landscape have only recently become visible, at least architecturally," she says. While many communities now have mosques and temples, those worship centers usually began in unlikely confines.
___"The first generation of American mosques could be found in places like a former watch factory in Queens, a U-Haul dealership in Pawtucket, R.I., a gymnasium in Oklahoma City, and a former mattress showroom in Northridge, Calif.," Eck writes.
___ The 2000 census illustrated the amazing cultural diversity prevalent in today's United States. Eck's research uncovers the religious diversity that comes with those cultural changes. For example:
___ A half-million Muslims live in Chicago.
___ Detroit, where one-quarter million Arab-Americans live, is the center of urban Islam in this country.
___ American Muslims (6 million strong) now outnumber American Presbyterians or Episcopalians and could already outnumber American Jews.
___ Only 25 percent of the nation's immigrants since 1965 have been Protestant. Forty-four percent are Catholic, and 35 percent are Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and of other non-Christian faiths.
___ Hundreds of thousands of Hindus live in the San Francisco Bay area. Los Angeles is home to more different types of Buddhist communities than any of the world's cities.
___Eck contends religious diversity has become so ensconced that many citizens ignore the vast changes taking place in their own backyards.
___This social and cultural shift is occurring not only in major metropolitan areas but also in the nation's smallest cities and towns. In areas off the beaten path, Eck and others on her research team found mosques, Hindu temples and Buddhist meditation centers.
___Eck's contends religious pluralism will prove more significant in future cultural, political and social battles than race, ethnicity or national origin.
___The American commitment to freedom of religion, a distinctive tenet first embraced to allow tolerance of different kinds of Protestant Christianity, has led to a pluralism never envisioned by the nation's founders, she says.
___"The vitality of religion in America has astonished observers from Alexis de Tocqueville to the present," Eck writes. "While state is religiously neutral, he noted, the peoples of the United States form a multitude of religious associations.

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